This is not a technical problem at all. This is a copyright problem. Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem until they had to pay 1.5 billion after they lost a copyright court case
Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and publishes it, risking copyright violation when done at large scale due to possible exceptions to this rule
> publishers and probably authors no longer exist
Who is going to claim a copyright violation?
> Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem
Did they? Then why did they "don't want anyone to know about this"? Or do you think their lawyers are dumb?
I imagine they know the public would react like the public is reacting. Like obviously this is not worse than what libraries and thrift shops do daily, but it is bad optics.
I don't think so. Libraries and thrift shops usually don't consider it a good idea to damage those precious, hard-to-reprint books. None would say anything if Anthropic only destroyed 1 million Harry Potter or Foundations